Swans' Michael Gira Says the Band Will Play 'Mostly Unrecorded Material' on Tour

Swans, the highly influential atmospheric band, is headlining the Granada Theater on its North American tour.  Swans, originally founded in 1981 by Michael Gira during New York City’s No Wave avant-garde music movement, will be touring in support of the group’s seventeenth studio album, Birthing, released earlier this summer on Gira’s own label, Young God Records.

For many music lovers and indie rock aficionados, Swans shows are a bit of a transformative experience, as the band’s influence on popular music may be hard to overestimate. Thurston Moore of Sonic Youth played bass in an early version of the band, and Kurt Cobain once cited Swans as a major influence on Nirvana. However, if there’s one signifier that Swans music is something special, it’s Gira’s commitment to maintaining a constant forward-thinking artistic motion, even while touring.

“On this tour we’re going to be playing mostly unrecorded material,” Gira says. “A few pieces I’ve recorded on acoustic guitar, but it’s a new experience for everyone, and it’s hopefully going to have a positive effect. I want to make something that is challenging to myself, my audience, and all our supporters.”
In the early 1980s, Swans released a series of heavy albums, including fan favorites Filth in 1983 and Cop in 1984. The albums ushered in a new dimension of sonic brutality that would go on to heavily influence doom, sludge and industrial music, not only for their dark atmospheric tones but also for Gira’s use of lyrical prose. Swans, a product of genuine creation, juxtaposed starkly against the backdrop of 1980s popular music.

“I didn’t think about it too much,” Gira says. “I just gathered people together, and we started making sounds. I knew we wanted to tear your insides out, but I wasn’t concerned with writing songs. I had a lot of things to say in those days, and I said them.”

Eventually, Gira’s voice attracted the mainstream recording industry as Swans was signed to Uni/MCA Records and released The Burning World in 1989. Although being signed to the major label had its initial perks, such as not having to work a day job, Gira found it to be more of a learning experience than anything. “From a personal perspective, it was a huge mistake,” Gira says. “I understand the allure of a big label because by the time I had signed to that label, I’d been at it nine years, and it was attractive, but it wasn’t worth it. It was positive in the fact that it made me rethink everything and start my own label.”

At the dawn of the '90s, Gira may have preeminently seen the distant wave of a major record label apocalypse coming 10 years beforehand and created his own Young God Records in 1990 to specialize in experimental avant-garde music. Swans would go on to release four more albums on Young God until going on a hiatus in 1997. In 2010, Swans reformed as Gira’s interest saw new light, leading the band to release seven more records, including 2014’s To Be Kind, produced by Grammy Award-winning producer and Dallas native John Congleton. Congleton, also locally known as the frontman of the band The Paperchase, worked closely with Gira in his Dallas studio, creating To Be Kind.

“I have fond memories of working in John Congleton’s studio,” Gira says. “I really liked working with him there, so most of my time in Dallas was spent indoors with the curtains pulled.” Gira considers 2025’s Birthing his latest in the long lineage of Swans albums that built his career, crossing barriers and taking artistic chances. “Every record is a rehearsal for the next one,” Gira says. “It’s like a film you go into as each record has an environment, a context and a world that it describes. The records metastasize; they grow, and it’s all intuition really, something correlating to abstract expressionism.”

Although Birthing and Filth are both sonic and textural worlds apart from one another, Swans’ first and most recent albums share Gira’s signature brand of atmospheric perspective. Where Filth is short, Birthing is long. Where Filth is fierce, Birthing is vulnerable in a ferocious kind of way, which unites the two in a conflicting and poetic symmetry. Album opener “The Healers” hits midway through the almost 22-minute track, dropping the listener quite unexpectedly into both physical bliss and visceral surprise. “I Am a Tower,” the second track from the album and recent single, also clocks in at nearly 20 minutes, establishing Swans as a possible antidote to current pop sensibilities.
The seven songs making up Birthing create just about two hours of music that ranges in temperament, mood and positioning, which oscillates between introspection and forceful gestures. Gira’s approach to the creation of such is relatively simple, given the complexity and sophistication of the music. “When I hear a sound in the studio that I think is great, I start imagining things,” Gira says. “One thing leads to another, and in the end, I’m always faced with the fact that I have 250 tracks on a song…and I have to mix it…different versions of the same sounds a lot of times.”

He also gives much credit to the musicians he has played with over the years in creating the band’s sound. “It inspires me to think about other musicians contributing and bringing out these sounds,” Gira says. “It happens magically and is both intuitive and a matter of how we all play together. The band wails, and in some sense, I’m conducting that.”

As for the future of Swans, Gira has said that Birthing will be the last big studio record, once again proving that as an artist, he’s only interested in moving forward. “I’m on to the next thing,” Gira says. “I want to do this tour and do it well and am looking forward to how the music develops live. I have a new idea and am gathering some kind of colors in my mind of how this next thing is going to work.”

Swans will perform on Tuesday, Sept. 9, at 7 p.m. at Granada Theater, 3524 Greenville Ave. Tickets are available starting at $38.93 on Prekindle.